Dick Cheney, the former US vice-president who was at the forefront of the post-9/11 push towards aggressive interrogation techniques since denounced as torture, has defended the use of “rectal feeding” of terror suspects, claiming it was done for “medical reasons”.

In a combative interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Cheney was unrepentant about the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were deployed under his watch. He swatted away evidence contained in the Senate intelligence committee report into the CIA programme that a suspect later found to be innocent froze to death having been shackled naked to a cell wall, and that detainees were rectally infused with food, refusing to accept a torture definition for either example.

“Torture to me is an American citizen on a cell phone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death on the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York City on 9/11,” Cheney said.

“There’s a notion that there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists did and what we do, and that’s absolutely not true. We were very careful to stay short of torture.”

The former vice-president led a concerted pushback from Republicans and intelligence chiefs to the Democratic-sponsored Senate report, dominating the Sunday morning talk shows. Several prominent figures denounced the report as flawed and dangerous.

Cheney was asked to respond to the evidence in the report that while being held at a CIA secret prison, a prisoner named Majid Khan had a lunch of hummus, pasta, sauce and raisins pureed into a juice that was then rectally introduced into his body. The incident was one of the most gruesome elements of a 600-page summary released last week that shocked readers around the world.

Asked whether Khan’s treatment amounted to torture, Cheney replied: “I’ve told you what meets the definition of torture – it’s what 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.”

Pressed by the anchor Chuck Todd, he added: “I believe it was done for medical reasons. That was not something that was done as part of the interrogation programme. It was not torture, as it was not part of the programme.”

Confronted with details of the treatment of senior al-Qaida figure Abu Zubaydah, who was placed in a coffin-sized box for 266 hours, Cheney said: “I think that was one of the approved techniques.”

When Todd referred to the death of Gul Rahman from hypothermia, Cheney rebuffed the question by saying that “the problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield”. He said he had “no problem” with a figure contained in the Senate report, that about a quarter of those subjected to torture had been later proven innocent: “I have no problem as long as we achieved our objective – to get the guys who did 9/11 and avoid another attack on the US.”

Cheney’s fiery and at times angry display was echoed by a chorus of condemnation of the Senate report unleashed by Republican leaders and the intelligence community. On CNN, the New York Republican congressman Peter King slammed the report as a “self-inflicted wound … that does a terrible injustice to the men and women of the CIA”.

Michael Hayden, who served as director of the CIA under both George Bush and Barack Obama, insisted on ABC’s This Week that the interrogation techniques had worked. He refused to say whether waterboarding was torture, adding: “I thank God I didn’t have to make that decision.”

When asked if he would have approved it, he replied: “I don’t know. It depends on the totality of the circumstances at the time.”

The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Mike Rogers, claimed on Face the Nation on CBS that foreign intelligence services had warned the Senate report would incite violence against US embassies. Though no such violence has erupted in the days since the report was published, Rogers continued to insist that “the risk is ongoing and very real. I think we will see a consquence.”

On Fox News, the former CIA official who oversaw the interrogation programme, Jose Rodriguez, said the Senate report “throws the CIA under the bus”. He said senior Democrats in Congress had been fully aware of the techniques, including waterboarding, that were being deployed.

“She never objected to the techniques at all,” he said, referring to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives.

While it was the turn of the CIA loyalists to have their say on Sunday, there were a few voices pointing to the contents of the Senate report as a clear violation of the Geneva conventions and other international laws against torture. John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate who was himself the victim of torture in Vietnam, said on CBS: “You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and have them freeze to death is not torture.”

Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator for Oregon, tried to debunk the prevalent Republican line of attack – aired by Cheney among others – that the Senate report was a partisan political ploy.